Azure AI Foundry Blog Series

Azure AI Foundry is a comprehensive suite of tools and services designed to accelerate the development and deployment of AI solutions on the Azure platform. Throughout this blog series, we will cover various aspects of Azure AI Foundry.

Part1 - Create project
Part2 - Language translation using AI Services
Part3 - Abstractive text summarization
Part4 - Deploy and use a generative AI model

Azure AI Foundry - Part3 - Abstractive text summarization

In this article, I will show you how to use Azure Cognitive Services for text summarization. 

Azure AI Foundry portal

• AI Services - Language + Translator

• Summarize Information - Summarize text

• Select a connected AI service resource or create a new one.

• Playgrounds - Summarize Information - Summarize text

Python

Sample code to summarize a PDF can be found in my GitHub repo. Following is an example of a resume summary: 

Hope this was useful. Cheers!

Azure AI Foundry - Part2 - Language translation using AI Services

In this article, I will show you how to use an Azure AI Service available within the Azure AI Foundry project. We'll use the language translator as an example.

Azure AI Foundry portal

• Select AI Services. 
• Click on Language + Translator.

• Select Translation.

• Select Text Translation.

• Click on Try with your own.

• Here I am translating language from English to Malayalam. Take a look at the Connected Azure AI Services, you can see it is already connected to one. Incase if it is not connected to an Azure AI Services resource, you can click on Create a new AI Services resource, select a region, provide an AI Services name if you like to and click Create and connect. 

• You can also view the sample code by clicking on View code.

• Here is the sample code in Python and when you scroll down you can find the Resource key and Region details.

Python

import os, requests, uuid, json

resource_key = 'resource_key_here'
region = 'region_here'
endpoint = 'https://api.cognitive.microsofttranslator.com/'

# If you encounter any issues with the base_url or path, make sure
# that you are using the latest endpoint: https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/cognitive-services/translator/reference/v3-0-translate
path = '/translate?api-version=3.0'
params = '&to=ml'
constructed_url = endpoint + path + params

headers = {
    'Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key': resource_key,
    'Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Region': region,
    'Content-type': 'application/json',
    'X-ClientTraceId': str(uuid.uuid4())
}

# You can pass more than one object in body.
body = [{
    'text' : 'where are you right now?'
}]
request = requests.post(constructed_url, headers=headers, json=body)
response = request.json()

print(json.dumps(response, sort_keys=True, indent=4, separators=(',', ': ')))

Sample output:

What you see is a unicode string and once it is converted you will see the corresponding Malayalam text. 

Curl

curl -X POST "https://api.cognitive.microsofttranslator.com/translate?api-version=3.0&to=ml" \
> -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: your_key_here" \
> -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Region: your_region_here" \
> -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
> -d "[{'Text':'where are you now?'}]" -v

Sample output:

Hope this was useful. Cheers!

References

• Translator Translate Method - Azure AI services | Microsoft Learn
• What is Azure Text Translation? - Azure AI services | Microsoft Learn
• Q: How do I use Azure Cognitive Services like Translator? | Microsoft Community Hub

Azure AI Foundry - Part1 - Create project

Azure AI Foundry is a unified platform that helps you design, customize, build, test, deploy, and manage generative AI applications. In this article, I will show you how to create a project and a hub, which are the first steps to building your AI solution. Let's get started!

Create project using the portal

• Sign in to the Azure AI Foundry portal https://ai.azure.com.

• Click Create project.
• The project will have an auto generated name or you can provide one. 
• You can also notice that it creates a new Hub, and Storage account, Key Vault and AI Services under a new resource group.
• Click Create.
• The project is getting created now. This may take a minute or two.

• Once it's done, it will take you to this overview page.

• On the Azure AI Foundry portal, you can use the Management center to configure/ get more details about your project, connected resources, models, endpoints etc.

• Under the Hub or Project properties, if you select the Resource Group, it will open a new browser tab and navigate to the Azure portal where you can see all the Azure resources that have been created to support your hub and project.

Create project using Azure CLI

Note: Remove any existing installation of the ml and azure-cli-ml extensions and install new.

• az extension remove -n azure-cli-ml
• az extension remove -n ml
• az extension add -n ml
• az extension update -n ml
  
  
• az login
• az account set --subscription "subscription_id"
• az group create --name "resource_group_name" --location "location_name"
  
  
• az ml workspace create --kind hub --resource-group "resource_group_name" --name "hub_name"

• $hub_id = "you will get this id from the output of previous step"

• az ml workspace create --kind project --hub-id $hub_id --resource-group "resource_group_name" --name "project_name"

In the next part we will explore the AI Services that are available within your Azure AI Foundry project. Hope this was useful. Cheers!

References

• Create an Azure AI Foundry project in Azure AI Foundry portal - Azure AI Foundry | Microsoft Learn
• Install and set up the CLI (v2) - Azure Machine Learning | Microsoft Learn
• How to create a hub using the Azure Machine Learning SDK/CLI - Azure AI Foundry | Microsoft Learn

VMware PowerCLI 101 - part12 - Get uptime and boot time of ESXi nodes and VMs

You can use the following PowerCLI commandlets to get the uptime and boot time of ESXi hosts and VMs.

• Get ESXi boot time.

> Get-Cluster | Get-VMHost | Select Name, @{Name="Boot time";Expression={$_.ExtensionData.Runtime.BootTime}}

Name                                  Boot time
----                                  ---------
esxi1.wxxxxx.com                      2/27/2025 10:13:45 AM
esxi2.wxxxxx.com                      6/18/2025 2:39:38 PM

• Get ESXi uptime.

> Get-Cluster | Get-VMHost | Select Name, @{Name="Uptime (Days)";Expression={(Get-Date) - $_.ExtensionData.Runtime.BootTime | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Days}}

Name                                  Uptime (Days)
----                                  -------------
esxi1.wxxxxx.com                      116
esxi2.wxxxxx.com                      5

• Get VM boot time.

> Get-Cluster | Get-VM | Select Name, @{Name="Boot time";Expression={$_.ExtensionData.Runtime.BootTime}}

Name                                      Boot time
----                                      ---------
test-vineeth
rhel84-vineeth
VMware vCenter Server                     2/25/2025 11:28:13 AM
vCLS-50a1b507-5a1d-5e00-8410-7599fc72e5b5 6/18/2025 2:51:59  PM

• Get VM uptime.

> Get-Cluster | Get-VM | Select Name, @{Name="Uptime (Days)";Expression={(Get-Date) - $_.ExtensionData.Runtime.BootTime | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Days}}

Name                                      Uptime (Days)
----                                      -------------
test-vineeth
rhel84-vineeth
VMware vCenter Server                     118
vCLS-50a1b507-5a1d-5e00-8410-7599fc72e5b5 5

Hope it was useful. Cheers!

VMware PowerCLI 101 - part11 - Get vCLS cluster state

vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) is a feature introduced in vSphere 7.0 Update 1 to ensure the availability of cluster services like DRS and HA, even if the vCenter Server becomes unavailable. It provides a distributed control plane for clustering services, improving scalability and resilience.

> Get-Cluster | select Name, @{N="VcsHealthStatus";E={$PSItem.ExtensionData.SummaryEx.VcsHealthStatus}}  
  
Name                    VcsHealthStatus  
----                    ---------------  
Cluster-01              healthy  
Cluster-02              healthy

Hope it was useful. Cheers!

VMware PowerCLI 101 - part10 - Verify vSphere cluster state

To verify the most common selected status attributes of the cluster:

Get-Cluster | Get-VMHost | Select Name,@{N='HAState';E={$_.ExtensionData.Runtime.DasHostState.State}},ConnectionState,PowerState,@{N='OverallStatus';E={$_.ExtensionData.OverallStatus}},@{N='ConfigStatus';E={$_.ExtensionData.ConfigStatus}},@{N='InMaintenanceMode';E={$_.ExtensionData.Runtime.InMaintenanceMode}},@{N='RebootRequired';E={$_.ExtensionData.Summary.RebootRequired}},@{N='BootTime';E={$_.ExtensionData.Runtime.BootTime}} | ft

> Get-Cluster | Get-VMHost | Select Name,@{N='HAState';E={$_.ExtensionData.Runtime.DasHostState.State}},ConnectionState,PowerState,@{N='OverallStatus';E={$_.ExtensionData.OverallStatus}},@{N='ConfigStatus';E={$_.ExtensionData.ConfigStatus}},@{N='InMaintenanceMode';E={$_.ExtensionData.Runtime.InMaintenanceMode}},@{N='RebootRequired';E={$_.ExtensionData.Summary.RebootRequired}},@{N='BootTime';E={$_.ExtensionData.Runtime.BootTime}} | ft

Name      HAState           ConnectionState PowerState OverallStatus ConfigStatus InMaintenanceMode RebootRequired BootTime
----      -------           --------------- ---------- ------------- ------------ ----------------- -------------- --------
10.90.1.4 connectedToMaster       Connected  PoweredOn        yellow       yellow             False          False 8/27/2024 7:31:10 AM
10.90.1.5 master                  Connected  PoweredOn        yellow       yellow             False          False 9/6/2024 9:08:09 PM

Hope it was useful. Cheers!